Saturday, August 12, 2017

Google and genetic determinism

There is a new wave of articles on biologial determinism, such as this:

As far as deterministic claims go, Damore’s are redundant — he could have just copy-pasted the text of one of thousands of these written in the early 20th century — and also milder than many. In the past few centuries, the same line of argument has been used to argue for the racial superiority of whites, the inferiority of women, and to justify transphobia. ... Still, biologically deterministic arguments like his can easily slip into eugenicist doctrines of yore.

Biological determinism is not necessarily even important to Damore's points, as noted by a commenter:

Whether the observed differences between men and women are culturally determined or biologically hardwired or some combination of the two is, for the matter at hand, completely irrelevant. This is the population that companies recruit their employees from, and even if the differences would go away if children would grow up in some gender-neutral utopia, it cannot be expected of a company to change society in such a manner in a time frame that is relevant for their hiring process right now.

Furthermore, I would not WANT a company, especially an extremely powerful one that basically provides large parts of the infrastructure for our communication, to be active in social engineering, without any accountability to the public. This sort of thing cannot possibly end well, especially if the people in charge have put on their ideological blinders and casually dismiss the current state of science (and anyone foolish enough to bring it up in the hope that simply being correct will protect him). ...

Ignore human nature at your own peril. It’s better to be aware of it, and to try to channel it into productive activities, than to deny and suppress it.

For strange political reasons, the Ctrl-Left believes that preferences for sexual relations are genetically determined, while gender identity can be voluntarily changed.

The research says that most human traits, such as abilities, interests, and personalities, are 50-80% heritable. Most of the rest has unknown influences, and you can call it choice or free will if you want. Cultural influences may also have a role.

If men and women are different before they walk into Google's door, then we would expect differences in their employment data. Whether those difference are genetic, otherwise innate, from family influence, from the larger culture, or from pure free will, is outside the control of Google and foolish for Google to try to do anything about it. For individual employees, Google has no way of knowing how he or she may have been influenced.

So all this talk of genetic determinism misses the point.

If you truly don't believe that there are any differences between men and women, and that all people have the same aptitudes and interests and other traits needed in employees, then Google should just be able to hire anyone and train them to undo whatever cultural conditioning they have. Google doesn't do that, of course. It has an overwhelming preference for Asian men as they readily adapt to a caste system where everyone acts and thinks as he is told.

Echo chambers maintain themselves by creating a shared spirit and keeping discussion confined within certain limits. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” ...

In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment. ... Those most zealously committed to the diversity creed—that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same—could not let this public offense go unpunished.